The kingdom of Veldrath sat at the empire's northeastern border like a comfortable old neighbor — not an ally in the formal, treaty-documented sense, but the kind of nation whose goodwill had been maintained through decades of careful mutual indifference and the occasional exchange of pleasantries at regional summits. Veldrath had good timber, passable silver mines, and the specific geo-political luck of having no resources quite spectacular enough to make it worth the cost of invading.
The Zenos empire had, accordingly, left it alone for two hundred years.
This tradition of benign neglect had produced, on both sides of the border, the kind of casual confidence that exists between people who have never had to seriously inconvenience each other. It was the diplomatic equivalent of never having argued — not because the relationship was particularly deep, but because the circumstances had never produced sufficient cause.
The circumstances, one month after Gorgina's audience with the king, had produced sufficient cause.
The envoy was a man named Councillor Harvist, who arrived at the Zenos palace with a delegation of twelve, a sealed formal letter bearing Veldrath's royal crest, and the expression of a man who has been given a task he considers beneath the gravity of its contents.
He was shown into the throne room at the second bell of the morning.
King Zemon Scougall received him seated — not the studied informality of the private receiving chamber but the full formal arrangement, which communicated seriousness. The throne room was arranged with the winter court still in partial attendance, a hundred nobles in their morning finery occupying the tiered seats along the hall's sides with the well-practiced combination of apparent attention and actual alertness that characterized the court's relationship to potentially interesting events.
The Councillor bowed.
"Councillor Harvist," the king said. "Veldrath is welcome in our court. I trust the journey was—"
"Forgive my directness, Your Majesty," Harvist said, "but the matter I carry does not lend itself to the usual courtesies."
A ripple through the assembled nobles. A directness with the king was a choice that required either genuine urgency or genuine foolishness, and the Councillor did not appear foolish.
The king's expression did not change.
"Speak, then," he said.
Harvist reached into the document case held by his aide and produced a sealed letter which he presented, via a palace attendant, to the king.
"Three weeks ago," he said, while the king broke the seal and read, "an attempt was made on the life of Her Royal Highness Princess Caelith of Veldrath, only child and heir to the throne of King Aldous Veldrath. The attempt took place within the palace grounds, during an evening garden gathering. Three men were involved. All three were apprehended before they could complete their purpose."
The court was very quiet now.
"Under interrogation," Harvist continued, with the careful, measured pacing of someone reading from memory rather than improvising, "two of the three men revealed that they had been commissioned from within the Zenos empire. They were able to identify their point of commission — a northern border town that falls within your empire's jurisdiction. They were able to describe the man who gave the order." A pause. "They were not able to provide a name. The third man died before interrogation could be completed — a method the royal physician described as consistent with poison administered before capture."
The king set the letter down on the arm of the throne.
"And the two who spoke?" he said.
"Alive and held, Your Majesty. Their testimony is documented and sealed with the royal physician's verification."
A longer pause.
The nobles in the tiered seats were engaged in the specific, very still alertness of people who are watching something important happen and have the wit to understand that the important thing is the thing beneath the surface rather than the thing on it.
Lord Jazaan, whose seat was nearest the throne on the eastern side, leaned very slightly toward the man beside him — Lord Rasfi's brother-in-law, a quiet man named Darveth — and murmured something too low for the room to hear. Darveth did not respond, but his jaw tightened, which was a response enough.
Lady Ashbeth, from her position on the western tier, had stopped pretending to occupy herself with the small embroidery frame she sometimes carried to morning court sessions and was watching Councillor Harvist with the focused attention of a woman who has been paying closer attention to certain dynamics than anyone in the room has given her credit for.
"King Aldous," Harvist said, "wishes it made known to Your Majesty that Veldrath has no interest in conflict. We have been neighbours in peace for two centuries, and His Majesty has no desire to alter that history." He paused. "However, an attempt on the life of the crown princess — the sole heir to the Veldrathi throne — commissioned from within your empire's borders and executed within Veldrath's palace grounds is not something that can be addressed through the usual channels of diplomatic correspondence."
"No," the king said. "It cannot."
"King Aldous requests — with the full weight of that word — that the Zenos empire conduct a thorough investigation into the source of this commission. He requests that the responsible parties be identified and brought to account in a manner consistent with the gravity of the offense. And he requests—" Harvist's voice was very even "—that this be accomplished before the matter is required to become public, which event would have consequences for the diplomatic relationship between our kingdoms that neither party could fully predict."
The king looked at him for a long moment.
"Councillor Harvist," he said, "please convey to King Aldous my personal assurance that this matter will be treated with the seriousness it warrants. An investigation will be opened within the week under my direct authority. The Zenos empire does not commission violence against neighboring crowns." His voice had not changed in volume but had changed in something else — a quality underneath the words that everyone in the room could hear. "Anyone who has done so using resources or relationships within this empire has done so without my knowledge and against my explicit interests. They will be found."
Harvist bowed.
"His Majesty will be pleased to hear it," he said.
"You will be received tonight as guests of the palace," the king said. "We will speak further in private."
The formalities of dismissal were performed. The Councillor withdrew. The throne room exhaled.
And then, in the particular way of court — the way that is less like one large conversation and more like a hundred small ones suddenly permitted — the room began to talk.
— — —
"Someone commissioned an assassination of a foreign crown princess," Lord Jazaan said, to the small group of nobles who had convened, with the instinct of their kind, in the eastern antechamber immediately following the audience. "From this empire's territory. Using people who knew how to poison a man before he could be made to give a name."
"The last detail," Lady Ashbeth said, setting her embroidery frame on the window seat, "is the interesting one. Anyone can hire men. Not anyone knows to have them prepared to die rather than talk."
"Someone with resources," Darveth said.
"Someone with practice," Ashbeth said.
The group was quiet for a moment with the particular quality of a group that has arrived at the same thought simultaneously and is waiting to see who will say it.
Nobody said it.
What they all knew — or suspected, or had pieces of that assembled into suspicion — was that this was not a random act of foreign interference. This had the shape of something internal wearing external clothes. An internal problem that had gone looking for a solution beyond the border and had made a noise that had come back across that border in the form of a Veldrathi envoy with a letter sealed in royal crest.
"The king will investigate," Jazaan said, finally.
"Yes," Ashbeth said. "He will."
Another silence.
"I almost feel sorry for whoever it is," Darveth said, very quietly.
Nobody disagreed.
— — —
In her apartments on the western wing, the queen's head attendant brought her the news at the third bell of the afternoon.
Lashina sat with it.
The tea in her cup cooled. The afternoon light moved. The attendant stood at a respectful distance and waited.
She had sent three groups after Styrmir. The last group she had sent with different instructions — not find and return but find and finish. She had sent them through channels that were not connected, on the surface, to anything that could be traced to her. She had been careful.
She had been careful, and three men had been caught in a Veldrathi palace garden, and two of them had talked before the third had managed to die.
They had described the man who gave the order.
Her man. Not her directly — she was not foolish enough to be describable by hired men — but her man. The man who stood between her and the thing she needed done, who was the one face that could be placed between a description and an investigation.
The one face.
Mel's brother.
She set her tea cup down.
"That will be all," she said to the attendant.
The attendant withdrew.
Lashina sat alone in her afternoon light and thought about the investigation the king had just promised in front of a hundred witnesses, and thought about the one face that stood between that investigation and the western wing of the palace.
She had always known it might come to this.
She had, if she was honest — and she was always honest with herself, it was the foundational discipline of her particular form of intelligence — prepared for it.
The question was not whether to act.
The question was the timing.
She stood and went to the window.
The palace gardens were very green in the afternoon light.
She had thirty years of practice at looking at pleasant things while thinking about unpleasant necessities.
She was not out of practice now.